Its chief medical officer, Viktoriia Kovach, a 31-year-old former obstetrician from Kyiv, permitted Andrii to spend a few days working in a field hospital before telling him bluntly, “Your skills are needed in Kyiv.
It takes a young civilian paediatric surgeon turned frontline trauma surgeon over an hour to extract the metal embedded in Sasha’s shoulder, using only a local anaesthetic as he burrows and probes.
Adult, paediatric and maternity hospitals have all been targeted, including, in July 2024, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, Okhmatdytin Kyiv, where a missile strike killed two members of staff.
Now an infantryman in the Ukrainian army’s Third Assault Brigade, “Sasha” (not his real name) has shrapnel embedded in his shoulder after the Russian assault on his foxhole.
Much more common are the improvised drones that went for Sasha – tiny, adapted commercial quadcopters that used to be popular for filming weddings, yet which, once armed with explosives, become diminutive killing machines.
